The Ackoff Center Weblog provides an opportunity to keep up with the latest research in Systems Thinking. It is also a forum where you can interact with others in the field and share your own experiences.

January 19, 2008

Knowledge versus Information

As I was wandering into a client today, Greg asked one of those
questions that lead to a teachable moment: "So Skip, it's clear from
our working sessions that you think that knowledge and information are
two different things. I've always thought of them as interchangeable.
What is the difference?"

What a great question. It took me a long time and a lot of work by one of my mentors, Russ Ackoff,
to help me see that these two concepts are very different. My simple
definition of information versus knowledge is that information is
structured data and knowledge is information in action. However, to put
the question in a larger context, I then introduced Ackoff's hierarchy
which I've come to call WUKID - Wisdom, Understanding, Knowledge,
Information and Data.